KIRKUS REVIEW

A bits-and-pieces memoir
of growing up in a working-class West Virginia family in the 1950s and ’60s.

Pleska (co-editor: Fed
from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains, 2012)—a freelance
writer, leader of writing workshops in her home state and book reviewer for
the Charleston Gazette—builds her coming-of-age memoir from a few
dozen brief anecdotes, an approach that frequently gives the feeling of being
notes for a larger, finished work. Following an introduction in which she
recalls making mud pies when she was 5, Pleska groups stories about her and her
family under the headings Images, Awakening, Awareness, Reaction, Loss and
Strength. An only child growing up amid assorted storytelling adults, the
author absorbed their stories and retells them here. In one instance, the same
incident is recounted three times, once by the grandfather, once by the father
and once more from the author’s point of view. Pleska’s earliest memories often
read suspiciously adult in the descriptions of settings, conversations,
thoughts and emotions. The best stories are those about her hardscrabble
family, which include especially vivid pictures of her paternal grandparents,
Mommaw and Pawpaw. A particular gem is her account of being taken along by
Pawpaw to buy a bottle of bootleg whiskey from a man who ran a cockfighting
business on the side. Pleska is candid about her hard-drinking father, a mill
worker whose binges and absences from home were constant trials for her
long-suffering mother. The author gives a muddier image of her mother, who
seems to be a mass of contradictions—though Pleska credits her with teaching
her to endure the adversities of life.

An uneven portrait of
rural and small-town West Virginia life that is most likely to have its
greatest appeal among nostalgic West Virginians.

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